Global warming takes down its first major political victim:

“Conservative Prime Minister John Howard suffered a humiliating defeat Saturday at the hands of the left-leaning opposition, whose leader has promised to immediately sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.”

Why the stunning loss? A key reason was Howard’s “head in the sand dust” response to the country’s brutal once-in-a-thousand year drought. As the UK’s Independent reported in April:

… few scientists dispute the part played by climate change, which is making Australia hotter and drier….. Until a few months ago, Mr Howard and his ministers pooh-poohed the climate-change doomsayers.

You can read about Howard’s lame attempt to change his position rhetoric on global warming here.

Now we are the last industrialized nation with a leader who refuses to take any serious action — hopefully that dubious distinction will be corrected in next year’s presidential election.

For Australians, the drought, called “the first climate change-driven disaster to strike a developed nation” was enough to change their views on global warming dramatically. Of course, Katrina could have been the first — but we have no way of knowing for certain if climate changed caused that hurricane to become so deadly. Let’s hope we don’t need to suffer anything as brutal as what Australia is going through before we commit to serious action.

Related Posts:

• Dry me a River: Climate change and drought
• Australian Report: The dry will get drier
• Australia’s ‘Food Bowl’ Running Dry
• APEC to world: Kiss my “aspirational” target
• Australia climate-related news
• Global Warming = Bush gets Fired
• Ten Reasons Why Climate Change May Be More Severe than Projected

Before you know it, Thanksgiving will be over, November will be over, and we’ll be counting down the days to the post-Kyoto negotiations in Bali, as part of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Never has there been so much pressure (with reason) on the U.S. as an international actor to lead in this fight. IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri has articulated the deadline:

If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.

Consequently, the expectations for what happens in Bali are growing at the speed of light.

And yet the Bush Administration is still not likely to budge. I feel like I’m watching a losing quarterback kneel with the football in the final minute of a game, rather than give winning a shot. Really, is this Administration’s choice failure?

At least on our end, we can’t let the holidays allow us to lose sight of Bali, which at the very least is an in-person gathering of political leaders and concerned groups from around the globe. After all, US action so far has been in those non-governmental hands.